Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  “[Classical] was his first love of music,” remembered George Gruel, who had settled into Warren’s Los Angeles rental at this point, becoming both his closest confidante and personal assistant. “He’d work endless hours on symphonies. I had the pleasure, more than once, of lying flat on my back under the seven-foot Yamaha grand piano, in our living room, and just listen to him play. Occasionally, he’d ask, ‘Got any more pot?’”

  Gruel continued, “Before, or after, the session, Warren loved to go into the studio and sit down at the ol’ grand piano and drift off… I loved watching Warren go off into that wonderful creative space where nothing else in the world is going on.”

  Warren’s early classical roots had been well emphasized in all press coverage his career had yet garnered, particularly his teenage association with Igor Stravinsky. Throughout his career, interviewers would almost always bring up that biographical tidbit, inadvertently solidifying Warren’s enigmatic persona rather than calling for his classical works to finally be heard.

  Warren’s closest friends and family were well aware how he longed to complete the ambitious symphonic work. Soon after, in his published Rolling Stone profile, Paul Nelson made it a point to demonstrate how pervasive the project was in Warren’s life: “Cassettes—Warren’s and mine—litter the living room. There must be 500 of them all over the rug. Albums line the wall by the fireplace: Shostakovich, Mahler, Stockhausen, Bartok, and Stravinsky next to Eddie Cochran, Jimi Hendrix, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Byrds, Dylan Thomas, the soundtrack from Casablanca. There are guitars, a piano, a synthesizer, and a bass signed by [Montreal Expos pitcher] Bill Lee. Plus, plenty of recording equipment. A shoulder holster hangs over the arm of an easy chair.”

  He added, “Zevon tosses me a portfolio labeled ‘Symphony No. 1,’ which he works on nearly every night. I don’t quite catch it, and the contents slide to the floor: pages and pages of meticulously annotated music and a dog-eared copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Perfect.”

  Nelson also noted that Warren truly “wanted to make his mark in classical music, as well as rock & roll,” but, much like the gun holster on the armchair, the unfinished symphony hung “like a stone around his neck.”

  “I wanted nothing more than to be a classical composer and conductor,” Warren later claimed. “That’s what I believed would be rewarding, and every thought of it was fun and exciting, romantic, swashbuckling, whatever. The problem was that there was no such thing. And there really hasn’t been any such thing since a cat named [Austrian composer and Arnold Schoenberg protégé] Anton von Webern was around. He was like, ‘the last classical composer,’ in the same way that maybe Samuel Beckett was the last traditional writer, or something.”

  Warren’s own personal struggles, coupled with career stresses, made for less and less time devoted to his classical ambitions. Undeterred, he would adapt much of his knowledge in music theory into the intricate home recording that would liberate his later work—coincidentally making him one of the first rock artists to later professionally use digital recording technology.

  In both theory and practice, Warren was able to intellectually legitimize his classical approach to composing rock and roll by viewing it through his larger perspective of the musical artists’ place in society.

  “So, what happens when there’s no more literature is that there has to be something else,” Warren later stated, extending his views on the place of the composer to that of all artists within the creative field. “What happens when there’s no more classical music is that, all of a sudden, bar music becomes elevated to the artistic stature of what classical music was in the nineteenth century. So, a conglomerate like the Beatles and their producer becomes every bit as important and of the same caliber and quality, as the great classical composers of the century before. With certainly no depreciation in quality of artistic, spiritual, whatever.”

  He added, “So, what I’m getting at is, maybe rock ’n’ roll is just running out. See, I think that these art forms, they run out. If you want to be a classical guy today and you want to write symphonies, like I wanted to do, then you pick the decade of the past that you want to write like. And you do some gimmick to ‘put a spin on it,’ as the critics say.”

  Although Warren’s later views on the state of rock and roll seem to border on the fatalistic, he nonetheless would continue writing and composing songs of multiple genres—especially hard-driven rock—with equal lyricism and maturity for the rest of his life. By incorporating pieces of Symphony No. 1 into Bad Luck Streak, he made his first and most pronounced attempt at blending the classical with the modernized sensibilities of rock-and-roll instrumentation.

  On the album, Warren strategically placed his brief classical vignettes between two specific songs: the twenty-six-second “Interlude No. 1” preceded the raucous rock anthem “Play It All Night Long”; the extended one-minute-long “Interlude No. 2,” which opens Side Two, softly led into the ballad “Bill Lee.” In concert, the orchestral pieces were cleverly arranged for synthesizer, adding an adrenaline rush to the anthem’s blaring opening chords.

  For the session, Warren arranged and conducted Sid Sharp’s fifteen-piece string ensemble—his first such opportunity to conduct since the 1975 sessions for “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.”

  “I’m no linguist,” once remarked David Letterman, the late-night talk show host and future Warren compatriot, “but I believe Warren Zevon may be the only man in the history of human communication to use the word ‘brucellosis’ in a song.”

  Linguist or not, Letterman’s observation was correct, and the aforementioned song, “Play It All Night Long,” instantly achieved fan-favorite status. When performed live, it acted as the ultimate showcase for Warren’s hardest-rocking abilities.

  The song is also the closest Warren came to entering the “Southern Rock” genre until “Renegade” off Mr. Bad Example over a decade later. Here, however, he brought a razor-sharp commentary and overtly brazen humor, creating an unlikely hybrid of rock anthem and dark satire. His use of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” was less a biting rip on the highly popular Florida-based blues rockers than a critique of the good ol’ boy, Bo-and-Luke-Duke types who misunderstood the 1974 hit’s meaning. It had originally been written by Lynyrd Skynyrd as a form of defensive response to two recent socially conscious ballads recorded by Neil Young, “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” both of which dealt with the serious themes of racism and its pervasiveness within the American South. The members of Skynyrd wrote “Sweet Home Alabama” as a celebration of sorts, championing the positive aspects of the South’s heritage, and the simpler pleasures that the rural lifestyle offered.

  Depicting presumably typical scenes of stereotypical hillbilly living, the song includes, among other images, a family patriarch apathetic to his own incontinence, a shell-shocked veteran older brother, cancer, incest, sweat, piss, jizz, blood—and cattle dying of brucellosis. But the song rocked too hard to offend, or tread dangerously close to novelty. As Warren later recalled, the song had been “written really fast on marijuana around the synthesizer ostinato,” referring to the song’s signature repeated melody lick.

  Although composed on the synthesizer, Warren would often alternate his lead instrument when performing the song live, demonstrating its unlikely interpretive versatility: a ballad-esque croon for solo piano, or a virtuosic showcase for his guitar skills when played using an arsenal of custom pedals. In the latter instance, Warren would memorably use the looped arpeggios created by the pedals to create a multilayered sound effect of his numerous guitar melodies at once, improvising over the sound-bed to simulate many guitarists playing in unison. On those occasions, “Play It All Night Long” could morph into a spectacular one-man jam session, demonstrating Warren’s every artistic ability—the lyrics, humor, piano-based composition, and self-taught lead guitar mastery—in one act. When an encore, standing ovations were common.

  As for the brucellosis: he’d found the term while reading Ne
wton Thornburg’s character-driven potboiler Black Angus. Set in the Midwest, Thornburg’s quirky noir tale of a broke Missouri herder’s desperate attempts to save his land, including a plot to fraudulently sell his dying cattle and a botched bank robbery, was well rooted in Zevon territory—but Warren never offered why he felt the rare cattle disease belonged in a rock-and-roll song.

  When they recorded the no-holds-barred anthem in the studio, Warren played the core synthesizer ostinato and other postproduction instrumentation, while Marotta and Sklar returned. Just as Waddy Wachtel had made a solo appearance in addition to his reunion with Jackson Browne on “A Certain Girl,” so Browne came back for his own vocal cameo, providing more layering to the song’s background harmonies. David Lindley added a distinctive tone with his lap steel guitar, which Warren later claimed “make[s] it one of my favorite tracks.”

  The fourth adrenaline-fueled true rock-and-roll offering on the album comes in the form of Warren’s famed collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, “Jeannie Needs a Shooter.”

  The collaboration was years in the making. Warren and Springsteen had met many times through their mutual friendship with Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and chief architect of The Boss’s public “blue-collar hero” persona. A few years earlier, Landau—who had long wanted to introduce the two songwriters—had mentioned to Warren the working title of a new Springsteen track, “Janey Needs a Shooter.” Warren immediately loved the title, and was excited to hear that Springsteen hadn’t yet penned the lyrics.

  “I asked Bruce about it many times,” Warren remembered later, “he finally said, ‘You like it so much, why don’t you write it?’ I did write a few lines, T-Bone Burnett added something, I cut a track and actually put strings on it, then showed up at Bruce’s house in Asbury Park in the middle of the night. He was asleep on the sofa in front of a videotaped baseball game. I roused him and played what I had for him. ‘It’s nice,’ he said, ‘but where are all the other verses?’”

  In fleshing out the rest of the lyrics that night, Warren and Springsteen began a lifelong friendship and mutual admiration. A single listen to the finalized “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” and the author of its opening verse—and subject matter—is immediately apparent. Revisiting the American Old West for the first time since composing “Frank and Jesse James” during his stint with the Everly Brothers in the early 1970s, this time around Warren didn’t attempt an epic story song; here, it is an old-time action Western in all its glory, summoning images of Alan Ladd on horseback, or a roguish Steve McQueen in mid-draw with his sawed-off Winchester Mare’s Leg—like Warren, wanted dead or alive. Amid a motif of melodramatic Western saga, the Shooter relates his tale of forbidden love for the hardened daughter of a local lawman, and their tragic attempt to run off in the sunset together. But, in true Warren fashion, the story instead finds our hero alone in the darkness—penniless and bleeding to death from a single bullet. Jeannie and her father ride off into the night.

  The recording took place during the same sessions as “Jungle Work,” incorporating the core lineup of Warren, Marotta, and Sklar—and the added benefit of Joe Walsh returning, giving another thundering turn on lead guitar. Warren once again retained the Sid Sharp Strings for the song’s stringed portions. George Gruel was able to snap a candid shot of Warren at the engineering console, a pack of Marlboros and the intricate sheet music for the “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” orchestral arrangement, remembering that studio session warmly as “perhaps one of Warren’s all-time favorites.”

  There is a long tradition of great writers finding deeper existential meaning within the competitive nature of sports. As Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer used boxing as a springboard for philosophical analogy, likewise troubadours and singer-songwriters have long followed in that literary tradition: Paul Simon had used the bare-knuckled vocation for the unnamed tragic hero of his eponymous 1969 “The Boxer,” while Bob Dylan had successfully turned the controversial “rush to judgment” case of real-life middleweight contender Rubin Carter into a hit folk-rock murder ballad, 1975’s “Hurricane.” In the case of Dylan, the song not only heralded a return to socially conscious compositions, it also helped earn Carter a new trial and, ultimately, his freedom.

  Warren’s studio albums were always conceptual and consistent in their own individual themes, yet each contained songs varied in genre and tone, often making for a collection of short stories rather than a typical rock release. As a descendent of literary tradition, it was only a matter of time before Warren rose to the challenge of penning his own sports-inspired compositions—three total throughout his career. The first was unlike any sports biography ever set to music, wherein Warren depicted the inner thoughts of an active real-life baseball player, recognized more for his countercultural significance than athletic achievements.

  However, Bill Lee had his fair share of devoted fans. During both his tenures with the Boston Red Sox and then Montreal Expos, the left-handed pitcher’s quirky behavior and frequent comments on marijuana advocacy had earned him the endearing nickname “Spaceman” and a host of unlikely celebrity admirers. With Warren, the admiration was mutual. Both men excelled within their chosen fields, but a similar sense of deep-seated individualism had worked to make each a dark horse, or maverick, within those fields.

  Like Warren’s own reputation as the hard-partying “excitable boy,” Lee had made headlines for similar offbeat and controversial behavior. In the spring of 1978, he became a household name of dubious distinction after admitting he used marijuana regularly and had been for over a decade. The notorious interview resulted in a $250 fine and a widely publicized scolding from Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In response, Lee clarified that he didn’t actually smoke pot—he preferred to sprinkle it on his pancakes.

  If ever a public statement would draw the amused attention of Warren Zevon, Bill Lee’s revelation was it. When Lee went on to declare his love of Warren’s music, claiming that Excitable Boy had become a staple soundtrack throughout the Red Sox clubhouse, the flattered singer-songwriter made it a point to seek out his baseball doppelgänger.

  While the Expos were in Los Angeles for a face-off against the Dodgers—and Crystal was still in Ireland—Warren was able to get Lee himself on the phone, expressing his own admiration for the ballplayer and extending an invitation to his rental off Sunset Boulevard. “Don’t bother comin’ down to the game,” Lee had told him. “It’s family night, you won’t be able to handle it.” Instead, Lee hiked to Warren’s house, a case of imported beer under his arm.

  Before the famed pitcher even arrived, aide-de-camp George Gruel was apprehensive about the effects such a visit could mean for Warren’s then fragile sobriety. Gruel remembered, “For Warren, it was the old, ‘I’ll just have one, George. You watch me.’”

  Warren later confessed the depths of his self-denial during that period, explaining to Paul Nelson: “I said, ‘Now look, George, we don’t necessarily have to buy all this stuff that the hospital tells us. I’ve been taking drugs since I was born. Let’s consider that alcohol may be just another drug experience that I had. So, let’s see if I can drink moderately.’”

  Warren continued, “So there was this one occasion—especially unfortunate since I think it left a bad impression on Bill Lee—when George said, ‘Okay. You can have a drink when he gets here. Don’t drink anything all day, and I’ll let you have a drink then.’”

  Gruel recalled, “It was three days of debauchery.”

  During the next seventy-two hours, Gruel and Lee “drank a bunch of Dos Equis and Warren swilled vodka.” Warren proudly presented Lee with seven demos for the upcoming Bad Luck Streak sessions, including the tentatively titled “The Ballad of Bill Lee.” Both inebriated and touched by the gesture, Lee proceeded to teach Warren and Gruel the countless card games he’d learned for needed amusement while on the road or between innings—those monotonous stretches when “ballplayers are supposed to sit around and nod at simple things.”

&nbs
p; After three days of drinking, mastering Lee’s preferred game of “Liar’s Poker,” and signing one of Warren’s beloved bass guitars, the Expos champ staggered out—but not before Warren exchanged the autograph for one more gift: the collected works of T. S. Eliot.

  “[Warren] was quite a fan,” Lee later remembered of the day, noting that he had been impressed with Warren’s demos, especially his own personal ballad. “I liked ’em. They had a lot of classical feeling.” Of Warren himself, Lee added, “He burns hard, man. He lives up in the Hollywood Hills; he’d just as soon not live there, but they want him to be alone and write. I suggested he put nothing out for a long time.”

  With the deadlines for Bad Luck Streak still looming at that point, Warren was under too much pressure to put Lee’s advice to use. He compromised with a brief sabbatical, however: according to Paul Nelson, Bill Lee’s visit unintentionally set off the binge that drove Warren into Pinecrest for the second time. As Warren later recalled, “A couple of days later, George said, ‘You don’t control the amount you drink. You didn’t stop yesterday. You didn’t stop today. When are you going to stop?’ I had a bottle and a half of Wild Turkey left. I said, ‘When that’s gone.’”

  The demo version of “Bill Lee” Warren played for its eponymous subject was not far removed from the final studio cut. In another first, Warren performed the brief track—which tersely clocked in at just over the one-minute mark—in a near solo setting, playing both piano and the clever harmonica phrases that symbolically substituted Lee’s notorious off-the-cuff witticisms. Aside from Warren, visiting Eagles alumni Glenn Frey’s soft harmonies are the only other sound on the track, making for an intimate ballad with an appropriately bluesy send-off. Leading into the track was Warren’s second and final classical portion, “Interlude No. 2,” presenting Bill Lee’s story with an almost majestic symphonic commencement. But with humorous observations—which easily could have been made by either Lee or Warren himself—“If you don’t, they’ll screw you / If you do, they’ll screw you, too”—the classical shadings only added a layer of sonic maturity to the otherwise darkly sarcastic lullaby.